How do I replicate Daz3D Iray skin shading in Blender EEVEE?
I am trying to replicate this skin rendered with Iray:
Notice the smooth yet defined skin and features, as well as the subsurface scattering, particularly under the eyes and mouth.
This is how I was able to make it look in EEVEE:
(.blend file: link removed )
Not too bad, but a lot of the detail is gone. I have enabled subsurface translucency under the material settings and tweaked the shader. Unfortunately, the more I change, the worse it gets. For example, increasing the Subsurface value makes the skin look blurry. Finally, there is this blue outline where the face borders on the plane below. As far as I know, there is no workaround for that. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Here are the material nodes:
How do I make the skin look more similar to the Iray render?
Comments
Please don't share the figure geometry.
You can't. Because iray is using true volumetrics for the skin that eevee can't do with figures. You need cycles for that. Your best bet is to use diffeo and copy and tweak the shaders from there. Then in general you can't expect that eevee can do everything iray does. This is ridiculous. I mean, eevee is nice and all but it's strongly limited in many areas, so of course you have to adapt your requirements to use eevee.
As for the blue outline it's probably due to random walk sss. Use burley instead and this should fix the artifact.
I understand that I won't be able to replicate it 1:1 in EEVEE. All I'm trying to do is to get it as close as possible and I wonder if there is anything more I could do. I will give Diffeomorphic a try, as I have been using the bridge until now, thanks for the suggestion. Switching the SSS method from random walk to Burley doesn't make a difference. It appears that the blue outline truly is a limitation of EEVEE with no workaround for the moment (https://developer.blender.org/T65849)
Richard, apologies if what I did went against the guidelines. Is it against the rules to upload any blender files including daz models, even if they're free to download in daz?
Yes, the content is free to use (in specific ways) for those with a license but it isn't free to distribute to others.
@nebiw20857 The sss leak should be fixed in blender 2.93 https://developer.blender.org/rBcd9a6a0f9389
That would be fantastic! Thanks for the info
I've tested it and the blue outline is almost gone in 2.93 Beta